In the context of the smart home, events are structured messages from devices, sensors, user interfaces, applications, keypads, etc. They are messages informing a software process that something has happened. This could be a sensor reporting a particular value, an error has occurred, or a slave processor letting our Home Control System know that it is still up and running.
Our contextual smart home is built around different pieces of hardware and software exchanging events in real-time (inter-process messaging). Our Home Control System is essentially a bit of software that processes incoming events and turns them into meaningful actions. These events are encrypted and in a format that is described by our Home Control System API.
We have defined our own extensible format for events and it is used for everything that we have connected to our smart home. We haven't found anything that it won't work with yet. And this is why it is a key enabler of our technology abstraction, allowing us to integrate any technology into our smart home. Essentially, this a 'unified communications protocol'.
